Diary Of A Genocidal Maniac
by eleanoralovesananias
Summary: Meet the Doctor's newest companion. She's pretty, genius, temperamental... and a Dalek.
1. Chapter 1

Fire filled the skies. The lesser life-forms scuttled wildly in the opposite direction, making strident screeching noises. Inside my casing, I gritted my teeth. I was firmly convinced that there was nothing more repulsive than the high-pitched squawks that came out of their disgusting fleshy bodies. I spun my dome, pointing my eyestalk at everything but the groveling lumps of fat and juice below me. Their shrieks grew too loud to ignore, as did the stink of their fear and of their flesh frying under my beam. Nausea rose in me, and I screamed the battle cry of my people, louder and louder, trying desperately to drown out their screams. "EXTERMINATE!"

With a gasp and a whir of my luminosity dischargers, I came out of stasis. My dome spun, taking in my surroundings; I instantly began strategizing, calculating exits, firepower, and enemies. It took a few seconds before I realized there were no enemies and no threat: I was in my isolation cubicle on the ship. The dull roar of the engines muffled the small sniffle I was unable to stop. Frantically, I shoved down the rising tide of un-Dalek emotion. Hatred bloomed in my stomach. Hatred, the sick salvation of my race, the cleansing fire that wiped all else away in a rush of blackness. But this hate was directed at an unusual target: myself. My own emotional, disgusting, un-Dalek self. I was almost fully grown, yet here I was displaying emotion like a recent convert, or a yearling who knew no better. My own big fat limbic system was what had gotten into this cubicle in the first place.

A spark of self-pity lit itself in my brain, so small I did not recognize it. But the cubicle system did. The wires plugged into my dome and plating sent a flare of electricity directly into my nerves. It was all I could do not to whine in pain. Instead I focused on the hate. Baseless, directionless hatred, towards everything in the universe. Towards my mindless fellow Daleks who had locked me up in this horrible place. Towards the fleshy lesser life-forms who dared to exist. And most of all, towards myself, and what I have become.

I am a Dalek. I have no name, no identity, nor do I need one. _Dalek_ is enough to make lower life-forms flee in their primitive terror. I am seventh-generation Dalek of Skaro. That is something to be proud of. So why does it hurt?

Suddenly the doors slide open, and a huge cherry-red Dalek wheels herself into the room. The larger size of her manipulator arm and luminosity dischargers, the smaller size of her gunstick, and her distinctive color make it quite clear who she is. I lower my gunstick and manipulator arm and direct my eyestalk towards the floor in respect. It is a difficult and dangerous job to be a Dalek Matron. Raising young Daleks is dirty work, and requires more cruelty than any other job a Dalek can have. The cold hatred she exudes from every inch of her Dalekanium plating is dazzling. Lesser life-forms might say her proportions were off-putting, but I knew that the true measure of Dalek beauty was brutality. A quality I did not possess.

"Your file has been reviewed," echoed the Matron. "Between the time all emotions should have been purged from you, and now, you have exhibited the following un-Dalek behaviors: Emotion, the desire for connection, pity towards un-Dalek life forms, pity towards un-Dalek Daleks, retreat in battle, independence, refusal to obey orders, misuse of gunstick, and misuse of Pathweb. It has been concluded by the Dalek Senate that your cortex vault is damaged. As all means of repair to the cortex vault was lost with the Cult of Skaro, you must be _exterminated_ before your un-Dalek traits can corrupt the remainder of the hive. You are ordered to report to the Senate of the Daleks in one hour." She moved her eyestalk to rest directly on me, waiting for an answer.

"I obey," I responded, trying to sound emotionless, a Dalek doing my duty. A real Dalek. Not this diluted, lukewarm filth with a damaged _cortex vault_ , of all things - the one part that couldn't be repaired by my antibodies. The cortex vault was the essence of what made us Dalek. It removed the filth and clutter of thought and emotion from our brains, filling it instead with clean black hatred. Without a properly functioning cortex vault, one could not be called a Dalek. My voice sounded weak, even to me.

The Matron turned and wheeled away. The doors whirred closed behind her, leaving me alone. All by myself in this horrible place, alone with my own un-Dalek thoughts. Something wet dripped down from my eye. The cubicle system detected my show of emotion and buzzed, but I gave the pain no notice. A different kind of pain burrowed within me, pulsating. I let my gunstick fall from the ready position, and more water slid down my face. I had known since I was a yearling that I would never be beautiful. Perhaps in the lower life-form estimation of beauty, but not in the way of my people. Dalek beauty was barbed and scintillating. It was hatred in a shell of polycarbide, without an iota of these contaminations I felt. I would never be selected for breeding. I wanted to be. I wanted to be the perfect Dalek soldier. But it was that longing that had gotten me into this mess.

The sentence - extermination - didn't bother me so much. My cortex vault wasn't _that_ damaged. In a way, it was comforting to hear the word that defined my people. Even if it was only looking in from the outside, just the Dalek-ness made it all almost worthwhile. I couldn't help a tiny, despairing sigh.

The hour passed quickly. It did not seem long before the doors opened, and I wheeled out into my own judgment day.


	2. Chapter 2

A blue pulsing light whirred at the door. The Doctor slipped into the room, knocked out the Dalek guards before they could alert the ship, unlocked another door at the other end of the small dark room, and stepped out into -

"Ahhh, no. Wrong room."

The Doctor tried to melt into the shadows, but that was hard on the brightly lit floor of the Dalek Senate. After his pounding hearts calmed somewhat, the Time Lord noticed that he wasn't dead. Turning his attention to the middle of the room, he saw one solitary Dalek. Its eyestalk was lowered in - respect? Reverence? Fear?

Carefully, the Doctor fished his sonic screwdriver out of his jacket pocket (where, due to some tricky timey-wimey calculations and things, it fit quite perfectly). The Time Lord flicked it open and scanned the Dalek, enjoying its usual... very loud... whirring sound...

The Doctor had just enough time to check the readings and for an expression of amazement and shock that would have astounded generations of young, pretty female humans (otherwise known as companions) to cross his face, before a thousand mechanical voices screeched, "THE PREDATOR IS HERE! EXTERMINATE THE PREDATOR!" The Doctor grimaced, more in habitual loathing than fear, as the deadly din clamored, "EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!"

"Run," he said out of force of habit, and did just that.

* * *

I waited to die.

Death didn't bother me, really. If anything, I felt relief. Relief, melancholy, particles of anger and disgust. I began giving my emotions names, something I had always refrained from doing in the hopes that, unnamed and unknown, they would die. Now it felt strange to acknowledge them, knowing that there was nothing at all I could do to control their existence, or my own.

Until the high-pitched whirring sound I had heard only in my nightmares filled the room.

I _screamed._ I admit it, I screamed like an underdeveloped fleshy female. But then, so did everyone else. The difference was that they were screaming Dalek things at the invader, whereas I was screaming wordlessly out of pure terror, simply having read the records... and heard the horror stories. His names were spoken only in whispers, meaningless epithets that sounded dramatic enough, but I knew came nowhere close to the true horror. _Oncoming Storm,_ they called him, _Predator, The Nameless Thing, The Bane of Skaro,_ even occasionally, sometimes with derisive sarcasm but more often reverently, _The Great Exterminator._ I had heard of at least one underground cult that worshipped him, the single-handed exterminator of more living beings than the entire Dalek race in its whole history.

They said he travelled inside of a living being he had kidnapped and enslaved for his own purposes, a living being which in itself could wipe out millions upon millions of Daleks in the treacherous guise of a human girl the color of gold, with the eyes of a wolf. They said he went down to the surface of the Asylum and wiped out every Dalek alive on the planet. They said he experimented on Daleks, splicing their pure DNA with that of his filthy flesh 'companions,' and turning them into dirty emotional halfbreeds who had to be exterminated for their own good. They said he ate Dalek nurselings for breakfast, cracking open their shells and juicing their blood, but I was mostly sure that one was just a Matron's tale to terrify the nurselings into not struggling against their isolation cubicles. Mostly.

 _The Doctor._

And now he was here.

I faced a new experience: a choice. This was an alien ordeal, and only served to remind me how increasingly un-Dalek I was becoming as my cortex vault gradually slowed its work. But the choice, the choice...

I could run, now, and perhaps hide from my exterminators in the chaos. But then what? A life in the darkness, under floorboards and among the pipes? How would I even maneuver, since I had no ability to elevate? There would be no hope of escaping onto a planet: fleshy life forms hated and feared Daleks. The only place I would be able to find peace would be an uninhabited world, and a Dalek ship does not stop where there is nothing to exterminate. I could not hide. I could not run. There was only one other option, and I quailed at it.

I could go after the Doctor.

When one thought about it, it was the most logical option, if only because it was the _only_ logical option. If I defeated the Doctor, I would certainly be pardoned, no matter the state of my cortex vault. I could live a normal Dalek life, alone in my isolation cubicle until called upon to guard, patrol and exterminate. I would live, and kill hundreds or thousands, but never be chosen for mating due to my rampant emotions. I would live completely alone, in the Dalek way, until I inevitably died in battle. That was what I wanted. I wanted to be a good Dalek soldier.

Slowly at first, but picking up speed in my terror as it sunk in just how reckless and dangerous an idea this was, I followed the fleeing, gleefully cackling form of the Predator. I tried my best not to think about being cracked out of my shell and juiced for my blood, but it is surprising how much one can think when in the middle of a battlefield. I dodged friendly fire beaming in the same direction I was wheeling, suddenly wishing I could bend at the waist like a fleshy to avoid it. Quickly I maneuvered through small doorways and narrow corridors, following him tirelessly. I did not fire yet. I did not want him to know I was behind him until he had no chance of escaping.

The one legend I had not heard at the time was how adept he was at that particular action. I was gaining on him, complacent in the knowledge that he was headed for a dead end, when suddenly he turned off the path, used the Death Wand (as one of my fellow nurselings had dubbed it when we were young) to open a panel in the wall, and slipped easily into the pipes, where no Dalek could go. He might as well have vanished from existence.


	3. Chapter 3

Quickly I spun around, squeezing my eye shut. I was not giving up yet. One blessing of having a damaged cortex vault was that my ingenuity was greatly increased. I accessed the Pathweb. First I searched up the records of the Doctor's slave ship. The _TARDIS,_ it was called. _Time and Relative Dimension in Space._ It took the deceptive appearance of a small midnight blue box, a form the monster had forced the shape-shifting being into at his whim. I downloaded its distinctive signatures into my battle computer, then opened a map of the ship and scanned for those signatures.

I found the TARDIS in a remote corner of the ship, on a small deck inside the electrical system that powered the ship. I knew instantly that once he reached it, the Predator would destroy the wires, thus cutting all power to the engines and - wait. How close were we to the nearest planet?

I checked the Pathweb and blanched. If the engines were cut now, the gravity of Adipose 2 would pull us in, and the ship would crash. Adipose 2, unlike its neighbor Adipose 3, was uninhabited, so it would be only Daleks who would die. The Predator was cleverer than I had given him credit for.

But that didn't mean I wasn't going to stop him. Because I, a single young female Dalek with a damaged cortex vault and a briefly suspended death sentence, was definitely going to stop him.

I plotted out a route that would take me as quickly as possible to the deck where the Predator was headed. There, I would meet him in battle. He was dangerous, insane and clever beyond belief, but two things he had none of were exterior shielding and extra lives. According to the records, he was on his last one. All it would take was one well-placed shot. This is what I told myself as I headed down the corridor to corner an insane Time Lord.

A squadron of guards passed me, screaming out orders and shedding Daleks into every branching corridor they passed. I resisted the urge to roll my eye. Apparently I was the only one who had thought to scan for heat signatures. They were still searching every hallway in the ship, while I not only knew where the TARDIS was, I had found two pulsating pinpricks of thermal energy akin to a binary vascular system, and I was tracking their progress and impeding it in every way I could. Every door he had to pass through, I shut remotely. (By the time he unlocked it with his Death Wand, I was closer to the TARDIS than he was.) Whenever I passed control panels, I would set off automatic security systems _en passant_ , filling rooms he was running through with gas and other booby traps and forcing him to take a longer route. My confidence was growing.

I took a right turn, then a left, then another left, and emerged onto the inner electrical deck, gazing directly at the TARDIS.

I had anticipated many things on the way here. I had thought about what the Oncoming Storm would look like, how I would kill him, what he might do to me if I failed. I had thought a great deal about the rewards if - no, when - I destroyed him. I had also thought about the TARDIS, that living creature enslaved and forced to serve as a ship for the depraved Nameless Thing. I imagined it would be twisted by now, probably brainwashed into loving its cruel master. I figured it would be an incredibly powerful weapon for my race. (There was a small voice in the back of my mind that pointed out that being experimented on and most likely eventually melted down for scrap metal was probably not much better than being enslaved and taken on joyrides across the universe, but I pushed it back.) I knew basically what it looked like. But I never in my wildest dreams imagined it would be _beautiful._

The TARDIS was stunning. My mouth fell slightly ajar. It was the richest, deepest, brightest shade of blue I had ever seen, somewhere between midnight and sapphire. One would not think a stationary box could seem alive, but this box rested on the deck with lithe grace, seeming to watch me with an ancient wisdom and something else. Compassion. The single luminosity discharger at the very peak of its gently sloped roof pulsated with a mesmerizingly winsome bluish light. In fact, the entirety of the being glowed faintly, though I got the distinct sense that the glow was not on the physical plane. I could feel a warm hum in the very back of my mind, and I wanted to cry.

A quick male form darted across the electrical deck, right in front of me.

I shook myself. The Predator! There he was! I fired my gunstick, again, and again, repeatedly missing the Doctor and hitting the magnificent creature he had kidnapped. I cringed with every blow to her sparkling blue hide. "DOC TOR!" I screamed, words separating into individual syllables as I grew more agitated. "EX TER MINATE! EX TER MINATE!" I fired again and again, shooting after him as he unmercifully yanked open a flap in the TARDIS's skin and dove into her belly.

I followed, desperate to take him out, now not only for my own sake, but for the sake of the tragically beautiful creature I had just fallen in love with. I could see him through the doorway, wrenching the TARDIS's insides and yelling, "Close the doors! Why won't the doors close!" He kicked her, and that was all I could take. I flew into the TARDIS after him, screaming my rage at seeing her treated this way.

Then the doors closed behind me, and it was just me and the Doctor - the Predator, the Oncoming Storm, the Bane of Skaro, the insane man who ate Dalek nurselings for breakfast - alone in his ship, me with no backup and nothing but my gunstick to defend myself, and him with everything imaginable with which to kill me.


	4. Chapter 4

There was a moment of utter silence as the Doctor gaped at the Dalek in his console room. Then the Dalek, as Daleks are wont to do, started firing. "EXTERMINATE!" it screamed, dome spinning and gunstick shooting laser beams everywhere: at the console, at random spots on the walls, at the doors, but mostly at the Doctor. The Doctor dodged behind the console, letting the TARDIS take the hits. Quickly, he dashed into a hitherto unnoticed broom closet just off the main console room, and returned hauling quite a few heavy iron chains.

He crouched behind the console and tried desperately to find a setting on his sonic screwdriver that he hadn't used in hundreds of years. "Come on, come on..." he muttered. The Dalek so far seemed content to fire from a stationary position, but any second now it would come around the corner, and he would be dead. His long, thin fingers grew frantic as the Dalek slowly began moving towards him, still firing wildly as if it couldn't stop. "Aha!" he shouted aloud.

The Doctor jumped from behind the console and pointed his sonic screwdriver at the Dalek. "Expelliarmus!" he shouted, giggling at his own wit.

The Dalek's motor apparatus and gunstick powered down, leaving it undamaged but essentially harmless. The Doctor dragged out the chains and began chaining the intruder to the deck.

"NO!" it screeched. "UNHAND ME!" For some strange reason, it sounded like the Dalek's voice was shaking. The Doctor dug out his ear, but the shaking failed to go away, so he noted it down as a side effect of his sonic screwdriver.

"Now, why did you let that in?" he muttered, patting the TARDIS console. He looked up at the cylindrical pipe in the very center of the room. "What's wrong with you, girl?" he asked worriedly, and began pushing buttons, testing switches, and reading from screens and other indicators in both English and Gallifreyan.

After a few minutes, he became aware of a sound from behind him. He listened, and a perplexed expression settled on his face. It sounded almost like...

The Doctor slowly turned around. The Dalek, chained to the TARDIS deck, was shaking. Its eyestalk was pointed downward in what looked like dejection. But the sound it was making was more horrifying than any yell of "Exterminate!"

The Dalek was crying.

It was then, staring in bewilderment at the sobbing Dalek, that the Doctor remembered the strange readings he'd gotten back in the Senate Room of the Daleks. He had had just enough time to read them before his old enemies had caught on to his presence, and had promptly forgotten them during the chase. He remembered, however, that they had been unlike anything he had seen before.

The Time Lord pulled out his sonic screwdriver again and scanned the sniffling Dalek. He checked the readings. Then he did a double take and checked them again. "What in the name of Rassilon?" he said aloud. One more time he scanned the Dalek, but the readings were still the same. He smacked his sonic screwdriver against the console and checked again. There was no getting around it, the readings were real.

"How does a Dalek like you," he asked the Dalek, "get to have a working limbic system? You people have a special machiney thingy to shut all that down." A possible explanation popped into his head, and he cautiously approached the Dalek. When it continued sobbing without paying him much attention, he pressed his sonic screwdriver directly against the back of the dome and scanned. He checked the readings. "Agh, not working. Stupid dalekanium, too thick for the sonic to pierce. You hear that?" he told the Dalek, increasing his volume as if it were deaf. "You've got a thick skull, and it's interfering with _me_ trying to figure out what's wrong with you!"

Frustrated, he threw himself down on one of the benches. An idea tickled in the back of his mind, but he tried to to keep it there. However, it refused to be ignored, and soon the Doctor had to face it. He tried to think of an alternative. There was none to be found. "Oh, _fine_ ," he said angrily to himself. The Doctor, now in a very bad mood, stalked over to his Dalek prisoner and kneeled in front of it. "I am _so_ going to regret this."

He had no idea how right he was.

The Doctor carefully placed a thin, cold hand on either side of the Dalek's even colder metal dome. The Time Lord closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the Dalek's, establishing a psychic connection.

A tidal wave of thoughts, memories and emotions came crashing into his mind. The Doctor gasped and fell backwards on the seat of his pants, slamming his head against the floor and breaking the physical contact, but the thoughts did not stop. They flooded his mind, filling it to the brim with all of the hatred and sickness and self-loathing and horrible, soul-consuming _pain_ that defined Dalek existence. Everything he despised about the Daleks, everything that made them so _other,_ was in his mind and he _understood_ it, and it was killing him. A scream ripped itself from his throat. Memories washed over him. Daleks were not born without emotion. Dalek nurselings were isolated at birth, removed totally from any kind of sensory contact, in order to drive them insane and turn them into psychopaths. Imagination, communication, independent thought, play, even the concept of self - all the things that humans and Time Lords marked proudly as developmental milestones in their children's lives - were treated as signs of retardation. Nurselings were repeatedly and randomly tortured to teach them that nothing they did made any difference in the world around them. Their flesh was burned and whipped to make them afraid of leaving their casings. They were beaten if they cried. When they were a year old, and their minds were damaged beyond repair, they were fitted with a cortex vault to remove all leftover contaminations, like compassion, feeling and empathy. After this, they were released into Dalek society, but even then the manipulation wasn't over. They were taught that hatred, cruelty and brutality were the marks of beauty and desirability, and only the most heartless Daleks were chosen to procreate, exploiting the natural instinct to pass on DNA for the rulers' own ends. The agony of a Dalek's life never stopped. The only outlet for their frustration was at other life-forms. That was why they always shouted the expression that the TARDIS had always translated as "Exterminate." It was a bad translation. Its real meaning filled the Doctor's mind, reaching every corner of his consciousness and suffocating him.

 _No more._

The Doctor screamed again, and this time there was blood in his throat.


	5. Chapter 5

The pace of my breathing increased as the Predator put his squashy flesh hands on my dome. Inside my casing, I shivered: the touch of them felt like something moist and decomposing.

But there was nothing so unexpected, so terrifying, and so very _other_ as the icy probe that sunk into the depths of my mind. I screamed. A primal terror filled me and I shrieked out an alarm that no one could hear. _THE PREDATOR IS LOCATED! SEEK AND DESTROY!_ I screeched, but I was trapped in a shielded enemy ship with the greatest enemy of my people sucking out my mind, and no one could hear me.

I screamed again, louder, as memories and thoughts and horrible fleshy emotions, even stronger and more varied than the ones I felt, flooded my mind. I understood for the first time the seemingly irrational, even random, actions of fleshy creatures. Alien emotions filled my limbic system, things I had no name for. A feeling like warmth and light and the color of the sky and the smell of vegetation, and in the Doctor's mind, its name was Joy.

 _No._

 _Not the Doctor._

 _That's not his name._

 _His name is -_

A blinding light filled the entirety of my mind, pain and joy and terror and beauty beyond measure. I screamed, and my casing burst.

* * *

The Doctor managed to pull himself up on one elbow, and gazed numbly at the Dalek. There was a large rupture in the front of its casing, extending all the way from the dome just below the eyestalk, continuing through a rip in the neck mesh, and ending in the collar. He could see the Kaled mutant inside, thrashing as if in a great deal of pain. The Doctor wondered, still dazedly, if the transfer had gone both ways. That could be a problem.

The still-disoriented Time Lord used the console to haul himself to his feet, and tottered over to the Dalek. He examined the casing. It wasn't as damaged as it first appeared, and would soon be repaired by its antibodies. (Sure enough, small eyeball-like antibodies started their work.) Which meant that whatever knowledge this Dalek had of him would be quickly uploaded to the Pathweb. The Daleks would know everything about him.

The Doctor froze, his knuckles white on the console. Not everything. Surely not everything. Yes, he had lost control of the psychic link when he became overwhelmed by the Dalek's memories, and yes, many of the most protected parts of his mind may have leaked across it. But not - surely not - not his _name_. No Dalek could handle that knowledge. It wouldn't damage them as much as it would other living creatures, but it would at least rupture their casing and leave scars on their flesh.

The Doctor slowly turned to look at the scarred, ruptured Dalek in front of him.

At this point, glad there were no companions around to hear him, the thousand-year-old alien said something unacceptable.

He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. "Okay, Doctor," he said to himself. "You've got a malfunction in the TARDIS, a Dalek in the console room, an out-of-control psychic link, and just about" - he checked his watch - "twenty minutes, if the shielding holds, before the most dangerous secret in the universe is out for every Dalek in the universe to see." The Doctor took a deep breath and cracked his knuckles. "This is going to be a tricky one." The Time Lord began reading scanners and nervously twisting his hands together, trying his best not to think about the horrors he had seen. He had seen many horrors in the course of his travels, but this was far different. Some - many - of these atrocities he was partly responsible for, for many of the policies behind them were created in fear of him. The stories they told about him imagined him as the stuff of nightmares. Perhaps he was. The Oncoming Storm. The big bad wolf.

The Doctor squeezed his eyes shut and pressed both hands over his ears, trying to block out the sudden guilt he felt about how he had treated the Daleks. They were the only living creatures in the universe for whose special case he had broken his normally pacifist way of solving things, and for what? So they could get worse and stronger in fear of him?

He turned around and glared at the Dalek. (The Dalek moved slightly backwards.) "You killed my people," he told it angrily.

Its dome spun to look at him. He felt its terror, its confusion, its burning pain and hate towards everything, and a sudden rush of anger towards him in particular.

"I was under the impression that was _you,_ " it replied coldly.

The Doctor stiffened. "Yes - well - it's different! I did that because I _had_ to! I had no other choice!"

"You have seen inside my mind, _Doctor,_ " the Dalek answered him sadly. _"_ How much _choice_ have you seen there?"

The Time Lord actually had to sit down, danger notwithstanding. He had always been a firm believer that the ends did not justify the means - at least since that one terrible day on Gallifrey. He had tried to be kind and not to judge any life form, because he knew what it was to be in the position of power with no way out. The Doctor remembered his ninth incarnation, and all the rage he had carried when he said to Van Statten, "If that Dalek gets out, it will murder every living creature. That's all it wants." Van Statten, for all his idiocy and greed, had asked the right question. _Why?_ Why did the Daleks want to kill? He realized now that he had never truly thought about the answer. But he _had_ known it. He had answered Van Statten, "Because it honestly believes that they should die."

The Dalek had tripled its shielding, he noticed on the scanners, after its last remarks. He almost laughed. It was terrified of him, the poor, damaged little thing. They all were. Just like River Song had said on Demons' Run. Just like Rose had said just after he had taken his leave of Van Statten. Just like Donna had said that night under the Thames. The Doctor pressed his hands over his face and wiped the sweat from it. _God,_ he needed a companion.

He blinked.

The Doctor turned to look at the damaged, empathetic, practically human Dalek that he couldn't get rid of, but couldn't let go.

 _Terrible idea,_ he told himself. _You can't have a Dalek as a companion. It'll never work._

He grinned.


	6. Chapter 6

I waited, helpless, on the deck of the Predator's ship. My motor apparatus and gunstick were nonfunctional, my luminosity dischargers dim, and I was weakened and exhausted by the intensity of the emotions I had been subjected to. My flesh was burned and scarred, but the pain barely bothered me. I had been raised a Dalek. I was more than used to pain.

What did frighten me was the fact that my casing was torn open, exposing me to the open air. It felt strangely cool, almost liquid, and played across the inside of my casing. I drew further into the warm darkness of my shell, but I could not escape. I could feel the differences in temperature and the gentle motion of the air, and I was afraid. Also, it was too bright. The ship glowed with a warm light, which, no longer filtered through my eyestalk, was radically brighter than anything I was used to. I had to keep my eye closed, but the heat hurt. I was suddenly fearful of my flesh drying out. The inside of my casing was climate-controlled and moist and dimly lit and _safe_. Everything outside resulted in pain.

The Predator was looking at me, the stalks that worked as his motion apparatus bent as he rested on the deck. The flesh around his eyes was pursed. It looked ugly. I wondered why he was doing nothing. My casing was open, my gunstick useless, and I was trapped. Was he taunting me? I wished, for the first time, that my usefulness in battle was not so dependent on my wiring. Fleshies' ability to fight with only their bare flesh was silly and weak, but it would make a semi-effective backup system for situations like these.

I almost blew my luminosity dischargers. "Situations like these." When, exactly, had a Dalek been in a predicament like this one? No one had ever gotten this close to the Predator before. I was unique. And doomed. _Your achievement is congratulated. Not only have you defied all Dalek custom and law, but you have courteously taken care of your own extermination._

If there was one thing I was good at, I reflected, it was the skilled execution of the only allowed form of Dalek entertainment: rampant, never-ending sarcasm. Too bad my talents were about to be wasted when the Predator killed me. I could at least try to upload his secrets to the Pathweb; I could feel my battle computer already working on bypassing the shielding. The Doctor must have known this. Why on _Skaro_ had he not killed me yet?

He spoke, then. His words were slow, almost cautious, yet carried an undercurrent of excitement. It was extremely strange to be able to identify emotions in someone's voice, but an out-of-control psychic link would do that. It took me a second to register what he had said.

"Would you like to travel with me?"

If my luminosity dischargers had almost exploded before, they must have ceased to exist entirely at that. _Travel?_

With _The Doctor?!_

It was insane. It was more un-Dalek than anything I had ever so much as considered. It was more un-Dalek than the acts of most _fleshies._ It would mean no contact with my own race, ever, unless I wished to be exterminated on sight. Possibly worse. There was the thought of, why was he asking me? This was the most dangerous of all Time Lords. He would kill me. He would _eat_ me. _Oh, Skaro. He wants to play with me first. He wants to hurt me. He wants to trick me into rejecting Dalek-kind and twist my mind until I am a living impurity, and then he will exterminate me. He will do it in front of my fellow Daleks. He will do worse than kill me._

* * *

The Doctor couldn't understand why there was so much terror at the question. "I'm not going to hurt you," he tried to tell it.

The Dalek tried to fire at him, then, panicking, began to ram against the chains, over and over and over again.

He stood up, raised his hands, tried to reason. Daleks were generally logical creatures, as long as you weren't trying to convince them not to kill you, right? "Why would I hurt you?"

"I am a Dalek." it stated. Of course. Racial hatred. What else does a Dalek understand?

"All right," he conceded. "But," he added, lifting a finger and gesturing with the other hand, "you have something I need. Something I can only get from you alive."

It eyed him warily. "I will _not_ be _useful_ to you."

"It's not about use."

Now he could feel confusion over the link. "What? What do you want from me?"

He breathed. He was about to take a big risk. What he said next could change the universe for the better, or get him killed. "Friendship," he said simply. He crossed his fingers and hoped for the best.

* * *

There was a fleshy expression that would suit my current thoughts. It was, "The _fuck?"_

I had heard of such a thing. It was an extremely impure idea; that of a special connection between two people not usually based on practical alliance, but rather an emotional fondness. The idea of the Oncoming Storm wanting to share such a thing with me struck me as utterly ridiculous. Who did he think he was fooling? But then, it was always possible that he meant it. He was insane, after all.

"I think perhaps you have misidentified me. I am a _Dalek."_

"So?" he asked.

Was he serious? "Let me impress upon you some words and phrases. 'Extermination.' 'Genocide.' 'The Battle of Canary Wharf.' 'The destruction of reality itself.' 'The _Last Great Time War.'_ Do any of these sound familiar?"

* * *

He almost laughed, but he remembered at the last moment that humor was not disarming to a Dalek like it was to a human. Everything depended on his charming this Dalek. It wasn't exactly something he'd done before. "But that's your race, not you. You weren't in the Time War, or you would be dead or insane. You weren't at the Battle of Canary Wharf, or you wouldn't be here. You certainly weren't on Sattelite Five or the Crucible, because I had a pair of very friendly but a bit excessive friends who weren't very nice to the Daleks there. They're married now, did you know that? Anyway. I know you people consider everyone in a race to be the same, but I personally think _you_ in particular haven't done much of anything to me. So why should I kill you?"

"Are you suggesting that I am un-Dalek?" It voice was trying to be cold, but clearly hurt.

He started to back up, but stopped. He could work with that. "Well... yes."

It screeched with fury. "EXTERMI-"

"Shhhh!" he shushed. "Shhhhhhhhh!"

It stopped in mid-word, mostly out of disbelief. He continued, "I'm sorry, I really am, but it's true. If you go back, they will kill you."

"Not if I kill you first."

He started. Was that what its plan had been? Frantically he waved his hands. "Well - yes - but - but do you really want to go back there? What's in it for you? It's not as if they can fix your cortex vault. I've seen what your lives are like. Do you have any idea how much worse that would be when you can feel? Your cortex vault will degrade. You'll feel more and more. Do you really want to know what it's like to have emotions when you're in battle?"

It shuddered within its casing. He was getting through, he could see it. But it wasn't going to be so easy. "I am a Dalek, damaged or no. I am loyal. You want me to betray my race out of _convenience._ What is "in it" for me if I come with you?"

 _Of course,_ he thought sourly. _Always got to be something in it. A carrot. Nothing is ever free._ But then, how much could he really expect of a Dalek, even a damaged one? That gave him a thought.

"Emotions are intense," he coaxed. "Even people who live their whole lives with them are overwhelmed, a lot. Trying to navigate all that on your own will be impossible. You'll end up definitely insane, probably dead. But I'm an expert at controlling emotions. I can teach you how to manage them, master them, even suppress them if you want."

He hoped that would be enough. If it wanted more, they both might be out of luck. He could push it into the Time Vortex. It would kill him too, of course; the psychic link was certainly strong enough. But if his name - his real name - was released, they would all most likely die anyway. It was a better alternative. But it wouldn't exactly be fun, having his mind torn apart from the inside out. Rassilon, he hoped it would accept.

There was a long silence. Then it spoke. "I will travel with you. I see no better option."


	7. Chapter 7

The Doctor ran excitedly around the console, being more cautious than usual and giving the Dalek a wide berth, while trying not to look like he was doing so. He still didn't trust the thing, even if he thought it had the potential to become better. The Dalek, for its part, followed him with its eyestalk ceaselessly. The feeling of tentative truce was stiff in the air.

"So," the Doctor said carefully, toning down his usual overexcitement for the sake of not overwhelming the Dalek with his emotions, "where do you want to go?"

"Go?"

The Doctor wrung his hands. There was procedure for companions ("it's bigger on the inside," "I'm an alien," "this is a TARDIS," "where would you like to go," "don't ask stupid questions," "don't wander off," "Geronimo" - or whatever exclamation the regeneration preferred-) and this Dalek was ruining it. "Yes, this is a ship, it can go anywhere in time and space. Right now we're just floating around. You're free now, and you've got the pick of the whole universe. Where do you want to start?"

Blank confusion from the Dalek.

He gritted his teeth, reminding himself that this was a Dalek who had the possibility of reform - wasn't that what he'd always wanted? So it was a bit... frustrating. So he had a not-really-that-small urge to attack it with something heavy and possibly explosive. He himself had said it: this Dalek had not been in the Time War. It hadn't done anything to him. He had a chance to change the universe, really change it - not just to preserve the timeline, but to actually influence events for the better. This Dalek was not his enemy. This Dalek was not his enemy. This Dalek was not his enemy. _Not_ his _enemy_. _Stop_ it.

He gripped the lever than would send two million volts through its chains and kill it for good, like every other Dalek he'd come into contact with since the Time War. His knuckles were white on it for at least thirty seconds. Then he forced himself to remove his fingers, one by one. Instinctive loathing curled white-hot in the fetal position inside his gut. He glanced back, and saw the Dalek looking directly at him.

Quickly, he stepped away from the console, putting as much distance between himself and the kill lever as possible, feeling guilty and not wanting to.

What he had said to the Dalek about emotions was true, not just in a sense, but the absolute truth. It had been a long time since he had talked to someone with lying or even stretching the truth, he realized. But he had, and to a _Dalek,_ of all beings in the universe. Emotions _were_ overwhelming. And he was most definitely an expert at controlling them.

So he smiled, clapped his hands, and said gleefully, "Well! I've finally got myself a companion with no particular aversion to Barcelona! The planet, I mean. They've got dogs with no noses!"

He ignored the Dalek's confusion and wariness - as well as his own - and set course for Barcelona.

* * *

I remained chained to the deck of the TARDIS, my enemy _smiling_ down at me. What an odd word, _smiling_. It frightened me. He frightened me.

But all I could do was play along. I was fully helpless. There was no way out. Ever. I was cut off from everything I had ever known, tied irreversibly to a creature who had absolute power over me. My options were to escape, and die horribly of insanity or extermination, to return, and die horribly of insanity or extermination, to fight, and die horribly of insanity or extermination, or to follow helplessly, play along with whatever he wanted, pretend everything was all right, and survive for as long as I could until either another opportunity presented itself, or whatever happened to me in the end... happened.

So I simply let him do whatever it was he was doing. I took the time to satisfy my curiosity about the TARDIS. Inside her belly was airy and cool, unlike the inside of my casing - which I sincerely hoped would be repaired soon, so I could stop curling up as small as possible and nearly crying from fear and cold - and spacious, the ceiling arched and gently curving down to the seam of the walls.

Branching, elegant supports of some kind of firm, living material stood in a circle, supporting the ceiling. The walls were studded with round eggs, set in casings of the same material. The deck was some sort of fine crystal. It was a gilded cage, but the gilding could have fooled me.

I had to resign myself to this. I had to be a submissive, docile prisoner, play along with whatever insane schemes my enemy came up with, and quietly lie in wait for an opportunity to get the hell out of here.


End file.
